Microtonal / EDO tunings in Kontakt 8

Soaria · 2025-06-20T00:39:28+00:00

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I've been getting into 31-EDO lately, and it's a really mixed bag across various software pieces. The most likely path to success seems to be using MPE and DAW tunings, but afaik Kontakt doesn't support MPE at all.

I'm wondering if anyone has had luck with the recent Kontakt versions and/or libraries.

The one workaround I did find was using the wrench/spanner editor and loading one of the preset scripts for "notes per octave", then picking the number of octave steps (in this case, 31). Regular MIDI notes would convert to the right values after that. But as has probably been pointed out on here, almost all new NI instruments have removed the wrench editor function, and I don't see any other way to adjust that. (Some libraries produce comically bad results with the tuning anyway, but more than I would expect just work, and well.)

Thankfully a lot of the older instruments still have the wrench, but I'm worried that this is going to change as they are updated for high DPI and such.

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stephen24

Not sure how MPE would help you, but Kontakt can work with it perfectly well. Just load multiple instances of your instrument into an instance of Kontakt, each on a different channel, and your MPE software will automatically allocate notes to channels as you play them.

Why is the factory script a "workaround"? Isn't this exactly what it was designed for?

Locking their libraries to editing is only one of the irrational and consumer-unfriendly practices that NI have adopted of late. Good thing if more people complained about it. My own workaround is to check for the spanner before purchase (watch the walkthrough) and if it's not there I don't buy it. There are plenty of other music software houses.

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